After handling her U.S. Nationals debut with composure and showing poise in a last-minute appearance at St. Louis with another team, Ashley Sanford said she’s ready to step up to the Top Fuel class full-time in 2018.

Quizzed about her potential new partner/s, Sanford said, “I’m not sayin’! I’m not sayin’! I can’t say!”

But Tami Powers can.

Powers, director of business development for Alan Johnson Racing, confirmed to Dragzine this week that Sanford, the double-shift deli waitress from Fullerton, Calif., and Swiss upstart Noah Stutz represent the sidelined organization’s desire to develop the NHRA’s next generation of drag racing headliners.

The plan is to secure funding for a two-car team featuring Sanford and Stutz. And while Johnson has made a bold Top Fuel championship-bid statement with Brittany Force, thanks to Countdown victories at Reading and Dallas, AJR has been working hard in its effort to plump the Top Fuel entry lists with Sanford and Stutz.

Powers said Johnson sees the tremendous potential of these energetic and personable twentysomething drivers, both of whom are too young still to sign a rental-car agreement when they travel to races.

“Alan Johnson has always been known to think outside the box and do things that aren’t traditional. This is a challenge for us,” Powers said, adding that the notion is exceptional for Sanford and Stutz, too. “For these two kids, it’s like being drafted by the New York Yankees. But we’re in a new era. The NHRA has laid the groundwork with its FOX Sports programming, and the sport is growing, both in fans at the racetrack and the TV audience at home. So we want to develop these two Next-Generation racers and tell their stories for the next generation. This is an initiative we want to take head-on.

“We make champions. We make world champions,” Powers said, emphasizing NHRA drag racing’s global reach.

Sanford, 23, is super-ready. “After getting to race Indy and St. Louis, I have 100-percent realized I want to be 100-percent focused on racing Top Fuel. So I’m going to put all my efforts into raising money to go Top Fuel racing, and we’re going to retire the alcohol car. We have decided as a family that with the A/Fuel race team, we’re going to retire everything after the Pomona Finals race,” she said.

She called the decision “very bittersweet, because this is where my heart was, growing up, watching my dad. These are my first memories, alcohol cars. But it’s exciting.”

Sanford said she and parents Shane and Michele have joked that the final two national events of the year, at Las Vegas and Pomona, Calif., are “our Eagles Farewell Tour.” She said her plans have not “been fully announced, but we are talking about it [publicly].

Johnson is aware that Sanford, who raced at Indianapolis in Dom Lagana’s car with K1 Speed and 805 Beer backing and at St. Louis for Australian champion Rapisarda Autosport International, is gathering as much information as possible about her options.

Sanford said, “We’re not going to [establish] a family team. It’s funny . . . I have my eggs in so many baskets that I don’t even know where they are. Of course, the Laganas [brothers Bobby and Dom] are absolutely incredible, but I know they’re very much focused on getting Dom in the seat [of his family-owned Nitro Ninja Dragster] as much as possible. I would love to see that. So if there ever were an opportunity, I’m sure we can work something out.

“It’s exciting. I want people to talk. But I’m actually currently working with a Top Fuel team — a championship-tier team who is not competing right now but they have in the past and they’re still involved,” she said, understandably coyly. “So I’ll let everyone kind of think about that. They really want to get back out here, though. We’re working really, really hard. The main goal is to get a two-car team out here, add some more cars to the entry list, and ultimately go for a championship.”

However, she said, “Even though I am working really hard with this team, I am not secured anywhere yet. Anything can happen in drag racing. Look at Leah’s story. One second you can have a job in a Top Fuel car and the next you can’t. So I’m being very cautious about that, and that’s why I’m talking to as many people — drivers, crew chiefs, team owners — as I can to really do my research and let everyone know what I’m trying to do at the same time. And hopefully if an opportunity comes along, I might be up on their list.”

Both Larry Dixon and Bob Vandergriff said they aren’t in any negotiations with Sanford. That left Alan Johnson Racing as the logical suspect. And Powers, who has worked for a couple of years to introduce Stutz to Corporate America and remind European interests that the 22-year-old from tiny Herzberg, Switzerland, is has star potential on the U.S. stage.

Stutz, who will turn 23 Nov. 11, has a couple of NHRA races under his belt, thanks to European mentor Urs Erbacher. He has been a crew member this season for Countdown driver Scott Palmer, getting a taste of full-time life on the road with the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series.

Powers said she is impressed with his spirit of adventure as he has served this apprenticeship, of sorts, with Palmer and been engaged in the nuts and bolts of the mechanics of a dragster. But work is nothing new for Stutz.

He grew up speaking Swiss German but taught himself English so he could follow NHRA drag racing, in a country that banned auto racing following the 1955 fatality-marred 24 Hours of Le Mans. (The death toll was 84 spectators and Mercedes-Benz driver Pierre Levegh, with about 120 more injured.) At age eight, he went with his father, hill-climb and circle-track racer Reto Stutz, to Hockenheim, Germany, for the NitrOlympiX and fell in love with drag racing. Reto Stutz told his zealous young son to save up 1,000 Swiss francs before he would get him a Jr. Dragster.

So the new drag-racing convert saved his allowance money, earned a few extra cents and francs by doing odd jobs to help out around the house. “After school, everyone was buying some candy and stuff. And I wasn’t buying some candy. I put all the money in a wood box I had at home,” Stutz said. “It wasn’t like 1,000 Swiss francs, but it was a little amount I could get myself to show Dad that I really want this.” He said he decided, “Maybe I clean his car or something like that, cutting the grass, just some little works like that.”

Four years later, they built a Jr. Dragster, then FIA Top Fuel star Erbacher added Stutz to his team to complement his dragster and a motorcycle. That was a major coup, for Erbacher is a three-time FIA European Top Fuel champion and three-time FIA Top Methanol Funny Car champion. He owns Fat Attack Custom Bikes and has starred in his own reality TV show, “Kings of Nitro.” So he’s a celebrity not just in Western Europe but also in the Middle East and Africa, thanks to the Discovery Channel’s 124-nation distribution of his program.

Noah Stutz laughed at the idea that one NHRA grandstand contains more people than his entire hometown. “It has 300 people in there. There are more cows than people,” he said of Hersberg. Still, he dreams of scoring big-time on both sides of the Atlantic, just like Swiss drivers Louis Chevrolet, Clay Regazzoni, Simona de Silvestro, and Roman Grosjean have done. But he isn’t just daydreaming. The climate is right for Stutz to capture the fancy of drag-racing fans, much in the way the 24-year-old Mario Andretti did in open-wheel racing more than 50 years ago, in 1965.

Stutz and Sanford have a chance to help the NHRA step into the future. The Top Fuel class’ “young stars” consist of Leah Pritchett (29), Brittany Force (31), and several drivers in their mid-to-upper-30s: Shawn Langdon, Steve Torrence, Morgan Lucas, JR Todd, and Richie Crampton. Terry McMillen, 63, is the elder statesman among full-time Top Fuel racers (although some entry lists include greybeards Chris Karamesines, Luigi Novelli, Steve Chrisman, Steve Faria, and Mike Strasburg).

“The stars are aligning right now,” Powers said, hopeful business investors recognize the NHRA’s upward trajectory that’s defying the current motorsports trend as NASCAR and IndyCar struggle to hold public attention.

Powers said Sanford “is a wholesome role model. She’s leading by example. The impact she’s having on these little girls who meet her at the races is amazing. She bends down and looks them in the face when she’s talking to them, and you can just see by the looks on their faces how big an impact she’s making. These young girls get the impression they can do anything, can accomplish anything.

“This isn’t a flash-in-the-pan hobby for her,” Powers said. “It’s all about the competition. When she earned her license, she said she didn’t want to stop the car — she wanted to keep going. And she’s kind and loving — but when she gets behind the wheel of the car, she wants to take you out. I love the dimensions of her. The NHRA has never seen a personality like that.”

Alan Johnson Racing appears to be the most heavily invested in Sanford’s future, but until contracts are inked, nothing is certain for either AJR or its prime prospects.

“We would love to have her and develop her as a driver,” Powers said of Sanford. “We’re not being territorial. We hope she lands with us. We’re supportive of her. She deserves to be out there.”